How ‘McSteamy’ Shaped My Life as a Surgeon — and as a Daughter

When Grey’s Anatomy premiered in 2005, I was a surgical resident. I was working 80-hour weeks, learning how to care for patients both at the bedside and in the operating room. I lived in Virginia, close to my mother. We relished our evening couch-and-TV time, and Grey’s was a welcome and thrilling retreat for us. We shared many sauvignon blancs and carryout dinners while watching the fictional doctors of Seattle Grace Hospital work and live together.

My mom learned about medicine through the story threads of Grey’s Anatomy. She could explain what an intern does, how residents train and grow to be independent, and how attending surgeons make final decisions. Through those characters, Mom understood the hierarchies, pressures and gray zones of medicine that made up my day-to-day. Grey’s Anatomy, though dramatic at points, provided my mother with a window into my work and life as a surgeon-in-training.

Fictitious but oh so real to us, Dr. Mark Sloan debuted in Season 2 of the still-running, 22-season show. Soon after being nicknamed “McSteamy” by hospital interns (an iteration of “McSexy” and “McYummy”), he made his iconic entrance in Season 3 from a steam-filled bathroom, clad only in a towel. Played by actor Eric Dane, Sloan was the sarcastic, talented plastic surgeon who had broken up the marriage of his best friend, also a surgeon.

Fans may not realize this, but McSteamy was also an ear, nose and throat (ENT) surgeon, which is what I am. ENT is not always the specialty that comes to mind when people think of surgery. A facial plastic surgeon, McSteamy also treated head and neck cancers, and voice and hearing disorders. We watched McSteamy bring to life some cases that were otherwise obscure. He resected tongue cancer, restored voices and repaired the chain of hearing bones in the middle ear.

Were the show’s representations of how these ENT cases manifest accurate? Not really. But the diagnoses and surgical solutions were real, however much they were dramatized. Dr. McSteamy showed viewers, including my mother, a glimpse of serious ENT conditions that many don’t know about until they are the unlucky ones to have them.

McSteamy also revealed the moral complexities of physicians. He was a compassionate and attentive surgeon. He was also heated and reckless. We watched him scandalously betray his best friend, fall in love with a woman who was decades his junior, and father a baby outside his committed relationship. In other words, life happened alongside his job in surgery. My mother, divorced since 1999, appreciated McSteamy’s fire.

Dane died at age 53 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was just two years older than I am. We both have teenage daughters. We were same-age peers. He drew the unlucky card of early and unfair neurodegenerative disease.